Speed runner breaks world record for Skyrim completion

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Back before Skyrim was the hottest open-world, modding machine on the market, a certain blogger put over 200 hours in Oblivion without ever having begun the very first quest in the game. The Elder Scrolls games are celebrated for packing so much content into a single title that you could play indefinitely. Even though players might forget it ever happened, the games try to have a narrative on top of the open-world exploration and cave-diving, and unlike the non-linear gameplay that has come to define the series, that narrative has a set beginning, middle, and end. On average, it takes about 31.5 hours to complete the story. Rushing through it takes about 19 hours on average. Speed runner DrTChops completed the story in 39 minutes and 32 seconds.

Back in 2011, Skyrim was completed in an extremely short two hours and 16 minutes. Now, three years later, DrTChops managed to beat the game in around a third of time.

The run had no completion requirements other than speed, and in the speed running world, classifies as an “any percentage” run. The run clocks in with two different times — one with load times, and one without. The 39:32 mark is without load times, while the time with loads clocks in at 45:12.

If you’re wondering how a game as stuffed full of content as Skyrim can be completed in under 40 minutes, you can head over to a Skyrim speed run database and spend the rest of your night becoming very intimate with the run’s various strategies.